An in-depth study by IDC with nine enterprise companies using EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems (note: Data Domain was acquired by EMC in July, 2009). Highlights of customer benefits include savings over $1,000,000 annually, ROI over three years of 264%, and payback in 6.6 months and a lot more. Read more in this IDC White Paper

1. WHIT E PAPER
The ROI of Backup Redesign Using Deduplication: An EMC
Data Domain User Research Study
Sponsored by: EMC
Richard L. Villars Eric Hatcher
March 2010
EXECUT IVE SUMMARY
www.idc.com
IDC conducted in-depth interviews with nine enterprise companies currently using
EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems (note: Data Domain was acquired
by EMC in July, 2009). The interviews provided valuable insight into the customers'
backup practices and yielded a large amount of quantitative data that IDC entered
F.508.935.4015
into its ROI analysis. This IDC White Paper takes a look at the specific business value
associated with using Data Domain systems as part of rapidly evolving backup and
data protection practices. The paper also examines how the use of Data Domain
replication capabilities to move data between systems further reduced costs for
backup/recovery and ongoing management, improved IT staff productivity, and
P.508.872.8200
increased space management efficiency.
Based upon the averages determined in this study, the highlights of customer benefits
realized from Data Domain can be summarized as follows:
Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA 01701 USA
Customers saved over $1,000,000 annually.
Customers achieved a return on investment over three years of 264%, and
payback in 6.6 months.
Customers avoided $200,000 in tape drive and library acquisition costs in the first
year after deployment.
Customers saved $156,555 annually in maintenance for existing tape
drive/library hardware.
Customers avoided over $80,000 in new server costs annually.
Customers reduced restore time from 4.6 hours to approximately 35 minutes.
Customers saved IT staff time equal to 1.6 full-time equivalents (FTEs) over
three years.

2. T HREE KEYS T O SOUND IT INVEST MENT
Effective collection and use of information are key requirements for organizations in
today's challenging business environment. With the right information, delivered at the
right time and in the right place, companies can better manage costs, make smarter
decisions, and react more quickly to changing conditions.
It is critical for executives across a wide range of industries to make wise investments
in the IT systems that support an organization's business objectives. When making IT
investment decisions, executives need to judge offerings based on three business
requirements. Does the proposed investment:
Help reduce or control increases in the cost of doing business (Deliver a strong
ROI)?
Ensure the integrity of the business in the face of system and site level failures
(Enable more effective disaster recovery [DR])?
Support increasingly diverse information management requirements (Deliver
capabilities that work across a growing range of applications, information types,
and data retention requirements)?
Controlling the Cost of Doing Business
Unforeseen or uncontrollable increases in the costs of IT systems are not acceptable
especially during times when companies need to tightly control capital and operating
expenses. Senior IT executives must reduce spending on IT equipment and
administrative resources, and a key component of these efforts is the consolidation of
IT assets to ensure optimal use as requirements grow. Technologies like server
virtualization — which allow IT departments to consolidate proliferating server assets,
boost server utilization levels, and be more responsive to new server requirements —
are seen as key elements in improving IT asset utilization.
However, advancing IT operational efficiency through consolidation is not a one-time
effort. As companies continue to expand, the resources required to sustain the
business can quickly begin to erode margins and inhibit future growth. Consolidation
must be seen as an ongoing, iterative process.
For example, the gains associated with server consolidation can quickly be
overwhelmed by increases in the storage and management required to back up the
growing pool of virtualized servers.
Therefore, IT organizations must deploy storage solutions that are part of ongoing
efforts to optimize datacenter efficiency. These efforts include reducing the costs
associated with legacy tape environments and minimizing highly redundant data sets
generated in virtualized server environments.
2 #220503 ©2010 IDC

3. Sustaining the Business
The best information in the world is useless if customers, employees, or business
partners can't access it when they need it. Concerns about the availability and
integrity of information can directly affect revenues and profits. Data management
issues related to corporate governance are raised that can influence reputations and
have significant legal implications.
The issues of business continuity and information availability have never been more
critical for business and IT executives as they make investment decisions. They must
deal with an expanding set of business-critical applications, a shrinking window for
acceptable time to application recovery, and a heightened awareness of the costs
associated with lost or corrupted data.
Improving recovery and data availability standards through more extensive and
frequent backups can often prove impractical or overly expensive. The need to
operate 24 x 7 means that backup windows are dramatically shrinking while the data
to be backed up is rapidly growing. Simply throwing more of the same resources at
the problem is financially and technically unfeasible.
In this new world, IT organizations must invest in solutions that allow them to
consolidate and automate data protection and recovery processes across the entire
organization. IT executives must lower costs and improve manageability for local
recovery while also leveraging data replication for backup across remote location to
boost overall application continuity and enterprise wide DR.
Accommodating Diverse Information Needs
Increasing IT efficiency purely to reduce the operational costs is acceptable, if an
organization's only goal is to enhance profits. Business success, however, is rarely
based purely on profit margins. Companies must continually seek out new customers
and new revenue streams through innovation in products and services. One of the
most important ways to develop and deliver innovative new offerings, today, is
through the more effective use of more diverse information assets. These include:
Relying on email, collaboration tools, and Web sites to communicate and conduct
business with customers and business partners
Collecting, storing, and analyzing more information about products, customers,
and transactions
Digitizing records, design documents, videos, and other types of unstructured
data to boost efficiency, offer new services, and comply with evolving
government regulations
The continued expansion in the creation and archiving of information is already
having a dramatic impact on organizations' storage environments, with IT executives
coming to the realization that the cost of storing and managing diverse data
repositories will become a major concern for many datacenter administrators.
©2010 IDC #220503 3

4. One clear example of the scope of the issue is the problem of dealing with aging CAD
files. In conversations with a number of design and engineering companies, IT
administrators told us that the active life for most CAD content ranges from 30 days to
a year. A quick scan of their file servers and NAS systems reveals that greater than
80% and often more than 90% of the CAD data on the system is duplicated and may
not have been accessed in months or years.
Today, many of these growing content pools (like the above mentioned CAD files)
over-consume expensive primary storage capacity and scarce backup resources
(time and capacity). In this world of exploding, yet sometimes unpredictable
information growth, IT organizations need to deploy storage solutions that can
accommodate a wide range of information assets and use cases.
The remainder of this white paper examines the many ways that EMC Data Domain
deduplication storage solutions help companies better address the current challenges
associated with companies' backup, recovery, long term storage and DR processes. It
also provides a detailed assessment of the business value and return on investment
that companies obtained from using Data Domain deduplication storage systems.
BUSINESS VAL UE OF DAT A DO MAIN
SYSTEMS
To ascertain and quantify the benefits from deploying Data Domain deduplication
storage systems, IDC interviewed IT executives and managers at nine companies
that had incorporated Data Domain solutions into their storage infrastructures,
including a major financial services company, Canadian National Railway (CN) which
operates North America's only transcontinental rail network, an international media
company, and a manufacturer headquartered in Canada with a global market and
additional manufacturing facilities in the United States, Europe, and Asia. The
interviews focused on the experiences of these end users and the actual savings
associated with data backup since implementing Data Domain systems. The number
of employees per company ranged from 5,000 to over 100,000 and the IT staff size
ranged from 12 to over 700. Within the IT organizations, an average number of five
staff worked with Data Domain systems directly. Study demographics are presented
in Table 1.
T ABLE 1
Demographics
Average number of employees 10,067
Average number of IT staff 285
Average number of Data Domain users 5
Source: IDC, September 2009
4 #220503 ©2010 IDC

5. Benefits
All nine companies interviewed by IDC have realized significant benefits from
deploying their Data Domain solutions. Reductions in backup costs have provided the
greatest savings, averaging over $1 million annually for each company. Annual
savings from increased IT productivity have averaged $204,210, while savings from
simplified and improved storage management have contributed an average further
benefit of $123,277 annually. Averaged over the nine companies, the savings realized
since deploying the Data Domain solutions have amounted to $1,347,640 annually.
The proportion of these benefits and the average annual savings is shown in
Figure 1.
FIGURE 1
Average Annual Benefits of Data Domain
1,600,000
Total = $1,347,640
1,400,000
123,277
1,200,000
204,210
1,000,000
($)
800,000
600,000
1,020,153
400,000
200,000
0
Improved storage management
Increased IT productivity
Reduced backup costs
Source: IDC, September 2009
Reduced Backup Costs
Much of the cost reduction stemmed from not having to upgrade tape libraries and
drives and from savings in tape drive maintenance. Customers found themselves
having to choose between increasing the size of an old and inefficient tape
environment and upgrading their means of backup to Data Domain systems.
Customers compared their expenses since the Data Domain deployment versus what
they would have spent on tape and, on average, customers enjoyed savings totaling
$429,264 annually (see Figure 2). Savings on tape transportation have contributed a
further annual savings of $71,510, on average, while reductions in the number of
contractors needed have added average savings of $77,571 annually.
©2010 IDC #220503 5

6. The following are summaries of the narrative discussions with customers that
deployed Data Domain systems and realized backup cost reduction benefits.
Before deploying the Data Domain solution, a financial services company had one or
two LTO tape drives that cost roughly $11K each, at all of about 80 locations. "Before,
we had a lot of tapes and we spent plenty of resource-hours swapping them," the
manager said. "Now we are tapeless. We're also saving on tape transportation — and
about 30 minutes a day spent swapping tapes at each location. With deduplication,
we are saving on disk space and probably avoiding $25,000 a year in new disks."
Prior to its Data Domain deployment, CN Railway had tape libraries at 10 remote
sites and tape drives at 17 other remote locations. Kevin Whelan, Manager,
Operating Systems and Storage said, "Now we have a Data Domain unit at each
location. We use them to replicate data to our primary datacenter. Before, we needed
someone at each office to take the tape out of the drive each morning and mount the
new one." The company estimates it is saving at least 20 minutes per day at its 27
facilities, which equals nine staff hours of savings per day. This company also uses
three Data Domain units to replicate data to its DR site. "We're saving time and
transportation costs because before, we would load the tapes at one site and a third
party service provider would drive them about 20 hours to our DR site so that we
could mount them into a tape library."
By using the bandwidth throttling capabilities of the Data Domain Replicator software
to control the data transmission rate between locations, companies are also able to
save on bandwidth costs. One manager said, "We transmit at a low speed during
certain busy periods of the day and at a far greater speed during quieter periods.
Without this feature, I would have needed twice the bandwidth at some facilities, so
it's saving from $20,000 to $30,000 a month on bandwidth."
By deploying the Data Domain solution, a media company was able to eliminate tape
libraries in its DR site and avoid an upgrade at its primary datacenter. "We had an
antiquated tape library at one site, and the local backup solution was problematic,"
the manager said. "We eliminated the tape library and replaced it with the Data
Domain system. Now we do electronic vaulting with two West Coast facilities and
replicate the data to our New York office."
Before its Data Domain deployment, one company was using an LTO format, that
was no longer supported by the tape drive manufacturer. "We had about 10,000
tapes, so we were looking at a major investment in migrating away from that media,"
the manager said. "We opted for the Data Domain solution, which paid for itself very
quickly since we were going through about 1,000 tapes every three months. We don't
write to tape anymore so the savings continue to add up." The company has also
been able to eliminate the operational bottleneck caused by tape backups. Prior to
the implementation, CPU utilization of the backup servers was restricted, but now
the utilization rate is above 80%, which allows the company to avoid buying
additional servers.
6 #220503 ©2010 IDC

7. FIGURE 2
Annual Reduced Backup Costs
1,200,000
Total = $1,020,153
1,000,000
800,000 429,264
($)
600,000
156,555
400,000 121,204
80,092
200,000 77,571
71,510
66,667 17,290
0
One-time tape library/drives upgrade savings
Savings on tape drive maintenance per year
Tape drive maintenance avoided
Servers avoided
Contractors eliminated
Savings on tape transportation
Tape purchase savings
Facilities savings
Source: IDC, September 2009
Increased IT Productivity
With the Data Domain solution, each of the nine companies needed fewer full time
equivalents (FTEs) for managing backup, auditing, and other functions. Also, on
average, the time spent on backup was more than halved and restore times were
reduced by 53%. Averaged over the nine companies, the savings from increased IT
staff productivity have amounted to $204,210 annually (see Figure 3).
The reduction in backup hours has accounted for $75,989 in average benefits
annually. Savings in FTEs to manage backup have contributed average annual
benefits of $32,838, while the need for fewer FTEs for auditing has provided an
average of $10,343 in additional annual savings.
The following are summaries of the narrative discussions with customers that
deployed Data Domain systems and realized increased IT productivity benefits.
A financial services firm was running out of time for backup before it deployed the
Data Domain deduplication systems. A manager said in the interview, "Our backup
©2010 IDC #220503 7

8. window is from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., and our servers were still crunching data
backups when they needed to be available for our users. Now it's all being done on a
real-time basis. Also, we don't need people to swap tapes, which saves us 30 minutes
a day at each of our locations."
One Data Domain customer is now saving approximately 47 hours a month, eight
hours per week in back-office IT labor because the Data Domain solution is easier to
administer and an additional five to 10 hours a month on managing storage allocation
and then five more hours a month on space reclamation.
Data Domain systems have allowed customers to greatly reduce restore times. One
customer was spending 24 hours a month managing backups at its main facility and
now requires only four hours for this task. The company's more consistent backup
strategy has also helped with audits. A manager mentioned, "We do audits every
quarter, and it used to take nine days to complete. Now I can do it in one."
FIGURE 3
Inc r eased Pr o duc t i vi t y
250,000
Total = $204,210
200,000
75,989
150,000
($)
100,000 53,653
32,838
50,000
17,585
4,470 10,343 3,394
4,000 1,939
0
Time for backup
Uploading or reloading data
Managing backup
Storage allocation
Auditing
Time to restore
Space reclamation
Database reorganizing
Restores
Source: IDC, September 2009
8 #220503 ©2010 IDC

9. Improved Storage Management
By shortening the restore time and reducing data storage errors and failed backups,
the Data Domain solution has helped the nine companies realize average benefits of
$123,277 annually.
The following are summaries of the narrative discussions with customers that
deployed Data Domain systems and realized improved storage management
benefits.
A manufacturing company went from 25 errors a month with its tape system to zero
errors with the Data Domain solution. "We would lose an average of two hours each
time an error occurred on our tape backups," the manager said. "We also lost data
when a tape failed. That has never happened with Data Domain. Also, the four or five
restores we do each week now take minutes each. Before, if the tape was onsite, it
might take an hour. If the tape was offsite, it could take up to eight hours."
With its tape system, CN Railway would do 20 or 30 restores a week. "If the tape was
onsite, a restore would take three to four hours. If it was offsite, and there was a
50-50 chance it would be, a restore could take two days," manager Kevin Whelan
said. "Doing restores quicker is definitely business-enabling. Before, if a user
accidentally deleted a report and had to wait two days, he or she would simply redo
the report, wasting valuable time."
The media company has reduced the number of system errors significantly by
replacing its tape system. "Recovery time is down, too, averaging about five minutes
compared with 30 minutes before," the manager said. "Also, we save time on restores
because they are instantaneous now."
Benefits, Investment, and Cumulative Cash
Flow Summary
Figure 4 shows the three-year investment in the Data Domain solution. As is common
in IDC ROI research, investments are highest in the deployment year, the year Data
Domain systems are purchased. Once the initial cost is accounted for, investment in
the following years declines and levels off over time. Ongoing investment is based on
standard hardware turnover rates and IT time required to maintain Data Domain
systems.
©2010 IDC #220503 9

10. FIGURE 4
Three-Year Investment in Data Domain Systems
1,000,000
900,000
800,000
700,000
600,000
($)
500,000
400,000
300,000
200,000
100,000
0
Investment Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
year
Ongoing maintenance
Training
Install labor
New hardware
Data Domain
Source: IDC, September 2009
Figure 5 illustrates the aggregated annual benefits, investment, and cumulative cash
flow over three years for the customers IDC interviewed in this study. Benefits are
highest in year one because customers avoided tape purchases immediately after the
deployment. Ongoing savings related to tapes include avoided tape upgrades and
avoided drive maintenance.
10 #220503 ©2010 IDC

11. FIGURE 5
Investment, Benefits, and Cash Flow
3,500,000
3,000,000
3,120,958
2,500,000
2,000,000
1,468,249
1,500,000 1,280,931 1,293,741
($)
1,000,000 778,384
500,000
47,859 47,859 47,859
0
-500,000
-1,000,000
Investment Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
year
Annual investment
Annual benefit
Cumulative cash flow
Source: IDC, September 2009
Return on Investment
The three-year IDC ROI analysis on Data Domain systems is based on initial and
annual investments compared with the benefits over the three years. Based on the
data gathered from the customers, this solution offers an ROI of 264% and payback
occurs in 6.6 months. Table 2 displays the ROI results.
T ABLE 2
Three-Year ROI Analysis
Benefits (discounted) $3,252,946
Investments (discounted) $893,334
NPV $2,359,611
ROI 264%
Payback 6.6 months
Discount rate 12%
Source: IDC, September 2009
©2010 IDC #220503 11

12. IDC ROI METHODOLOGY
IDC's ROI methodology measures the efficiency of solutions uses the findings to
calculate ROI for the deployed systems. The method includes four steps:
1. Evaluate the internal and external costs of administering the systems before
deploying the solution.
2. Ascertain the investment in the purchase, implementation, and deployment of the
solution. It is important to estimate not only the initial purchase cost but also the
required implementation, integration, consulting and/or training costs. To
measure the total deployment investment required, IDC includes questions that
cover both the cost of purchase, setup and integration as well as ongoing
software fees and IT maintenance time.
3. Measure the cost savings and gains in productivity, availability, and efficiency
achieved using the solution. Portions of the interviews are dedicated to the
discovery of cost reductions, including both "hard" IT costs, such as savings in
server and back-up tape purchases and "soft" costs, including IT staff productivity,
IT management efficiency and end-user productivity. For this study, we have
modified our standard category labels to what is found in the parenthesis:
Cost reduction (reduced backup costs): IDC asks about what costs have
been avoided or reduced for servers, back-up tapes, bandwidth, licensing
fees and avoided travel. Savings are reported in terms of dollars per unit
saved or annual reduction in spend.
IT staff productivity (increased IT productivity): To measure changes in IT
productivity, IDC specifically asks about the reduction in time to restore
databases or mission-critical business applications, the reduction in back-up
window time, time spent auditing and uploading/reloading data.
Improved management of space (improved storage management): IDC asks
the customers specific questions about the number of data storage errors
per week, recovery times, failed backups per week, restore times and user
productivity lost during restore.
4. Calculate the payback period and ROI for the deployed solution. Based on the
aggregated interview data, IDC calculates the payback period and rate of return
based on the overall cost savings resulting from the investments in Data Domain
systems.
ROI and Payback Period Calculation
Assumptions
IDC bases the payback period and ROI calculations on a number of assumptions,
which are summarized below:
Time values are multiplied by burdened salary (salary + 28% for benefits and
overhead) to quantify efficiency and manager productivity savings.
Downtime values are a product of the reduction in downtime hours multiplied by
the number of users affected and their hourly rate.
12 #220503 ©2010 IDC

13. Because not every hour of downtime equates to a lost hour of productivity, IDC
specifically asks about the percentage impact of an hour of downtime and
attributes a fraction of the hourly result to the dollar savings.
All IT solutions require a deployment period. The full benefits of the solution are
not available during deployment. To capture this reality, IDC prorates the benefits
on a monthly basis based on the average deployment term.
The net present value of the three-year savings is calculated by subtracting the
discounted three-year investment from the discounted three-year benefit. IDC
uses a 12% discount rate to account for potential outlays made at the time of
deployment and interest on that expense.
CHALL ENG ES AND OPPO RT UNIT IES
The insights EMC Data Domain customers provided clearly show that the use of disk-
based data deduplication and replication services can have a dramatic impact on the
costs and problems associated with backup/recovery and DR processes today.
Organizations' data protection, DR, and long-term data management requirements
will only increase in coming years; therefore, EMC will need to further extend the
scale and scope of its Data Domain solutions.
One key challenge for companies is the need to accelerate the recovery times
associated with large numbers of virtual machine images. As companies shift to a
primarily virtualized server environment (and make broader use of desktop
virtualization), they are increasingly concerned about potential "boot storms" triggered
during full datacenter recoveries or start-of-day desktop boots. The Data Domain
deduplication storage systems play an important role in helping manage this process,
but the company must also ensure that it offers solutions that meet the intense data
recovery performance required in a broad spectrum datacenter recovery.
Another key challenge for companies is the looming "archive problem." The
digitization of many business processes (records, images, videos) is driving an
explosion in the creation and storage of rich content. Concurrently, changing
corporate governance requirements associated with regulatory compliance and
eDiscovery are forcing companies to store this content for ever longer periods. These
pools of rich content can quickly overwhelm backup and archive systems geared to
support more traditional applications. EMC has the opportunity to help companies
better manage fast-growing content archives through further enhancements in its
Data Domain solutions (e.g., more content-specific services) as well as greater links
to its broader storage and information management portfolios.
FINAL T HOUG HT S AND ESSENT IAL
GUIDANCE
IT managers at large and midsize enterprises are wrestling with many of the same
challenges as they seek to boost IT asset utilization and improve business
continuity/availability. They are looking for storage solutions that improve the
usefulness of other IT assets while significantly reducing both capital and operational
expenditures. Meeting these objectives, however, takes more than just identifying
©2010 IDC #220503 13

14. the right use case and selecting the right solution. They also need to make wise
implementation decisions that shield them from costly system reconfigurations and
storage migrations.
IT managers who acquire storage products must evaluate suppliers such as EMC, as
well as their business partners, based on more than just which company is providing
the cheapest or highest-performing systems. IT managers need partners that can
help them overcome or avoid the traditional shortcomings:
Under use of installed assets
Less than optimal data/application availability
Excessive administrative overhead
IT managers should judge suppliers based on how well their solutions allow them to
optimize the use of IT investments now and for an extended period. They also need
to look for business partners that leverage emerging solutions to address specific
application and business challenges while delivering faster, more consistent
implementations with minimal risk of disruption to applications, processes, and
business operations.
APPENDIX: DAT A DO MAIN CUST OMER CASE
ST UDIES
Case Study on Canadian National Railway
Overview
Canadian National Railway (CN) deployed EMC Data Domain deduplication storage
systems in 2007 to improve backup and restore functionality using the solution's
ability to deduplicate. As Kevin Whelan, Manager, Operating Systems and Storage,
said, "We could see great advantages to Data Domain's approach. And we
investigated a number of companies when we looked at our storage needs."
CN has over 22,000 employees with 725 staff supporting them. The IT organization
has three dedicated staff managing Data Domain. The primary datacenter is based at
the Montreal headquarters. The company's storage demand was constantly growing
across all of its 27 North American offices. There is now a Data Domain appliance at
each of these locations and one central system that replicates to the primary
datacenter.
CN is using Data Domain in two ways: First, the IT organization replicates data from
its many satellite locations back to the Montreal office. Second, the company uses a
dedicated Data Domain system in Philadelphia for disaster recovery (DR). Prior to the
implementation, CN would transport all of the disaster recovery tapes to Philadelphia
by truck.
14 #220503 ©2010 IDC

15. Reduced Backup Costs
The Data Domain deployment was a good fit for CN's business needs as the
company's current tape drives were at the end of their life cycle and some form of
storage upgrade was a necessity.
CN discontinued tape services and maintenance contracts, which saved the company
approximately $100,000 per year. The company has also avoided repairing tape
hardware failures — resulting in an additional estimated savings of $175,000
annually.
The company has avoided purchasing between 50 and 60 new tape drives total while
meeting the continually growing demand for new storage. Company managers
estimate they are saving over $100,000 on new tapes annually, while storage
demand grows at an average rate of 25% per year.
As Whelan said, "We are saving on bandwidth because of Data Domain systems.
Some of our locations were running at very slow speeds on 256K circuits. If we
continued transmitting entire backups over that link at the same time that my users
are online — everyone would suffer." To improve transfer rates, the company
estimates it would have to spend up to $30,000 more per month — that cost is
avoided due to Data Domain replication efficiency.
Increased IT Productivity
Before the Data Domain deployment, all of the CN sites were using tape backups. As
Whelan said, "Each location would have someone that would go in the morning, take
a tape out of the drive, and then mount the next tape. That took 15–20 minutes by the
time they went to the server, took out the tape, filed it away, put in the new one." But
since the implementation, those tasks have been completely eliminated. The
company is saving an estimated nine hours a day across all of its offices.
The IT organization does 20–30 data restores, on average, per week. Before the Data
Domain deployment, if a tape was onsite, then the job would require three to four
hours of work. But if a tape was offsite, restore time quickly increased to two days.
With Data Domain replication now in place, the company is still well protected from
site disaster, and restores are completed in two hours since recoverable data is
always onsite. In a data recovery situation, CN would avoid approximately 20 hours of
vendor transport time because tapes are no longer moved between Montreal and
Philadelphia.
Improved Storage Management
CN has approximately 22,000 users that benefit from the Data Domain deployment.
In the past, if a report was accidentally deleted, the user would have to recreate it
from scratch. But with Data Domain the report can be restored in less than two hours,
allowing the user to avoid re-inputting that data. As Whelan said, "If a user needed a
report the same afternoon, they would just start redoing their work because the old
restore process was too long for them to wait. Now, they don't panic because they
know all the data is going to be there for them."
©2010 IDC #220503 15

16. Data Domain includes a bandwidth throttling capability which allows the IT
organization to determine the data transfer rate. Obviously, the organization does not
want to perform a large backup during peak usage. Using this feature, CN starts
backups at the end of a business day and completes them before 8:00 a.m. the next
morning. During typical work hours, the staff slows the Data Domain transfer rate so
that performance is not adversely affected. Whelan said, "The ability to control the
only transmission rate was a tremendous feature for us."
CN has saved a significant amount of disk space using Data Domain. In the past, the
IT organization would write the same piece of data to tape every day. But since
deploying Data Domain deduplication, data is written to only once. As Whelan said, "If
the data has already been saved once, it will not be saved again."
Offsite data management has been improved since CN has moved away from using
an outside vendor. On any given day, IT productivity could be negatively impacted by
simple logistical issues. As mentioned in the interview, "One day we asked for the
vendor to bring us an offsite tape so we could do a restore. He said, 'As soon as they
finish changing the oil in my car. The tape is in the trunk, and it's up on a lift right
now.' With Data Domain, we don't run into issues like that."
Case Study on Global Communications
Corporation
Overview
A global communications firm deployed EMC Data Domain deduplication storage
systems because of the system's highly efficient means of data backup. The
company's demand for storage was getting so high that the IT organization simply
could not afford to continue backing up to tape. As a Senior Technical Director, said
in the IDC interview, "We chose Data Domain because of the way that they compress
data and the way that they deduplicate data. It has the ability to take a gigabit at line
rate for the duration of the backup window. The algorithm that Data Domain runs
lends itself to very high throughput numbers right to their published specification.
Their specifications are 200 megabytes/second for the DD500 Series, and those
machines will do that all night long."
The company has been using Data Domain for over a year and is in the process of
deploying more systems at numerous facilities.
Reduced Backup Costs
Data Domain is now the primary backup target, and the company has significantly
reduced the amount of tape and tape hardware used across the organization.
As the Technical Director said, "In most cases, Data Domain completely replaced
tape. In our five new locations where we started with Data Domain in the first place,
we never even deployed tape."
The company estimates that tape and the associated hardware savings are
approximately $385,000 per site annually. As he said, "When you look at those savings
over our 27 sites in this deployment, this has been a good value." This is a savings of
$10.4M annually — $30M savings over a standard three-year hardware life cycle.
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17. By using Data Domain, the company purchased smaller backup servers than it
otherwise would have. The director said, "We have not avoided new servers
altogether, but the ones we did buy were smaller, cheaper units than we would have
normally purchased. We are saving about $35,000 per server, per site." This is equal
to an additional $945K in annual savings.
The firm has also been able to reduce potential risks during auditing. Since deploying
Data Domain, it is possible to vault and ship data offsite, which keeps the company in
compliance.
Increased IT Productivity
The company's staff managing backups has avoided time spent studying trends on
tape usage, replenishing tapes, labeling, and then storing the backups. The company
has three dedicated staff working with tapes, but their time spent on these tasks has
been reduced, "by 15% — and they can work on other tasks for us now."
Data backups take less time than in the past because the data transfer rate of Data
Domain systems is faster than that of tape. The Company estimates that in an
average week, 22 staff members are saving at least 10 hours loading data. In the
past, restores would take between four and six hours. Since the deployment, that time
has been reduced to less than one hour.
The Data Domain deployment required only about two hours to install the storage
units and needed no further maintenance time. This is more efficient than other
solutions. As the director said, "With other storage, we would allocate and continue to
allocate based on backups and backup servers. A lot of the benefit of Data Domain is
that it takes many of the tasks multiple teams were doing in the past and consolidates
them so that one person is able to do it." The company estimates the IT staff is saving
15 to 20 hours per Data Domain system, per year in storage allocation tasks.
Improved Storage Management
The director summarized, "Data is now more portable. It can be backed up quicker,
and that actually has a dramatic impact on the organization. Data Domain has
changed the dynamics of how our teams work. We are starting to see a shift in
personnel as we take tape libraries off of the floor and reduce pressures on that team.
It is all because of electronic vaulting — my team can now handle all of the storage
based on the efficiencies that Data Domain brings."
Case Study on Financial Services Corporation
Overview
The financial services corporation, managing more than $180B in education loans,
first deployed EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems in May 2008 — a
decision that was driven by the company's need to reduce costs by eliminating its
dependence on tape backup. At its central location, the company had three people
managing backups.
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18. Reduced Backup Costs
The two greatest factors in reducing costs were savings on tapes and savings on the
associated maintenance. The company's Technical Architect estimates that the
corporation was able to save over $800,000 in tape expenses and $100,000 in
maintenance costs in the first year after deployment. The company has 12 remote
sites that purchased new tapes regularly and handled their own separate tape backup
environment. Since implementing Data Domain, expenses including tape purchase,
drive maintenance, and transportation have been completely eliminated.
Because the corporation uses Data Domain, it has avoided a tape refresh that would
have cost over $500,000. The company has been able to collapse all of its tape
libraries or eliminate them altogether. The 12 remote sites no longer use any tape at
all — that data is now housed in the main datacenter.
The company has been able to avoid purchasing at least three media servers per
year, which has resulted in a savings of over $30,000 annually. In addition, the
company no longer faces annual software renewals and maintenance renewals
related to its old backup system. The Technical Architect estimates those savings
total $25,000 annually.
Increased IT Productivity
At each site, the company has increased its IT productivity by one full time equivalent
(FTE). If that time savings is carried out to all 12 sites, the benefit is over $700,000 in
staff time.
As the Technical Architect said, "We are no longer constantly repairing bad tape
drives and mechanics. We have reduced our transportation contract and are saving
our administrators three to four hours per day for not having tape."
In order to protect against potential tape failures and minimize the amount of time
spent waiting for restores, the company duplicated all of its tapes and kept one set
in-house and another offsite. The company would back up to these duplicate tape
sets three or four times a month in the past, but it avoids the process altogether since
the Data Domain deployment. In addition, there has been a significant improvement
in the amount of time required to perform a restore — that time has been reduced
from one hour to just 30 minutes.
Before the Data Domain deployment, it was common for the company to experience
one tape failure per day. Repairing the average failure required about three hours of
an internal technician's time. Plus, a company administrator would have to coordinate
with a vendor to help solve the problem, which would typically add another three
hours to the process. As the Technical Architect said, "We had many, many tape
failures. Those would result in loss of staff time and loss of data on that tape.
About 5–10% of the time, the tape was just unrecoverable, and we would have to look
for another copy. And if we had to go offsite for that, it was about a half a day to find
the tape."
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19. Data Domain's capacity allows the company to recover data faster and to points in
time earlier than using tape drives. As mentioned in the interview, "One time some
tapes fell down an elevator shaft. The tapes were being brought out by the disaster
recovery team — about five of them fell all the way down the shaft. And one of those
tapes was critical and not backed up."
The Technical Architect also said, "With the number of restores we have, Data
Domain has gained a good reputation with us. It is known to be a reliable restore
solution. People are happy when they see that their data is on a Data Domain
appliance, as opposed to a tape appliance."
Case Study on Global Equipment Supplier
Overview
A global equipment supplier for the plastics industry manufactures custom injection
molding machines for its clients. Customers use these custom molds for a variety of
products, including automobiles, cell phones, toys, and home storage units.
The company was at a crossroads in 2005 when it selected EMC Data Domain
deduplication storage systems. Storage requirements dictated either refreshing the
entire tape environment or finding another technology that could serve its growing
data needs. A challenge facing the company was to either purchase new tapes in
LTO-1 format, which was no longer supported, or find a new solution altogether.
Deploying Data Domain required a minimal amount of time — the time between being
taken out of the box and the staff performing backups was only about eight hours.
The company spent one additional day validating the data prior to putting the Data
Domain systems into production.
In the first three months after deploying Data Domain, the firm was able to pull
approximately 1,000 tapes out of circulation. The company keeps one of its tape
libraries active for data restores from legacy tapes only, and as an IT Systems
Manager said, "We are just letting those old tapes expire naturally. We don't write
anything to tape anymore."
Reduced Backup Costs
The company has avoided purchasing new tapes and new tape drives since the Data
Domain deployment. The company estimates that over the past five years, it has
avoided purchasing at least 12 tape drives that would have cost $11,000 each.
The company has also avoided server expenses and increased its current servers'
utilization rates. The IT Systems Manager mentioned, "We have avoided buying
servers and we also find our backup time is faster and servers are running a lot
harder." Prior to the Data Domain deployment, the tape drives were causing a
bottleneck and server utilization rates averaged 20% to 25%. But since the
implementation, backup times have been improved and the average utilization rate
has been increased to roughly 80%.
©2010 IDC #220503 19

20. Data Domain systems have created greater data management efficiencies, which
have allowed the company to avoid hiring new IT staff. The manager said, "It has
allowed us to keep up with the workload. Prior to bringing Data Domain in, my group
was restructured and two people were moved to another team. So, for me, the
question was 'How am I going to make up their hours?' But after the install, we
managed with no problem — even after losing those two."
Increased IT Productivity
Since the Data Domain deployment, the company is saving IT staff hours when
performing backups — instead of spending about 40 hours per month managing
backups, the staff now requires only four hours per month. The IT staff is now able to
pursue more business-enabling tasks. As the IT manager said, "Basically, since we
are not spending all of our time doing backups, we can spend about 10 more hours
per week on business projects and system maintenance."
The company experiences fewer data, system, and tape errors since the
implementation. The company estimates that one in every 100 tapes completely
failed, and in the past, about 25 basic tape errors occurred per month. "To address an
event, it could have taken a number of actions to completely repair. If we had a
physical drive problem, we could spend 8–12 hours for just one event." Since the
Data Domain deployment, the company is saving at least two hours per month on
average just by avoiding errors related to tape.
The company now has more consistent backup windows and reduced restore times.
Before, when writing to tape, backups could take as long as six hours to run and the
restore time was between 12 and 14 hours. Since deploying Data Domain, backups
and restore time have been reduced to only four hours each. As the IT manager said,
"There was a huge difference in our restore time, especially on things like databases.
Our file systems run in about half the time."
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